


our love is like the border between Greece and Albania (trucks loaded down with weapons)

by Quietbang



Category: X-Men (Movieverse), X-Men: Days of Future Past (2014) - Fandom, X-Men: First Class (2011) - Fandom
Genre: Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, Angst, DOFP spoilers, Disability, Gen, Honestly Charles What Are You Thinking, Implied Relationships, Implied/Referenced Self-Harm, Internalised ableism, M/M, Mild Hurt/Comfort, Pining, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Traumatic Injury, Unreliable Narrator, Withdrawal
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-05-28
Updated: 2014-05-28
Packaged: 2018-01-26 20:30:14
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,050
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1701524
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Quietbang/pseuds/Quietbang
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>He doesn’t break immediately. He thinks that should be made very clear. </p><p>In the immediate after, in the haze of medication and traction and surgery, of spinal fusion (<i>there is metal inside of him and it seems so unfair, that his vulnerability should be inside of him too, steel and wire holding him together until it seems he will break apart</i>) and of physiotherapy, he is numb.</p>
            </blockquote>





	our love is like the border between Greece and Albania (trucks loaded down with weapons)

**Author's Note:**

> Wow, so I've just splooged all of my Charles feelings all over the place here. Warnings for alcoholism, prescription drug abuse, low self-esteem, implied self-harm, and medical trauma. As a disabled person, writing about how Charles adjusts to his injury is always fascinating to me, and after seeing DOFP I thought it was important to write about how Charles gets from the beach in Cuba to where we see him in 1973, and how he might move on after the end of the movie.  
> Spoilers for Days fo Future Past abound.

He doesn’t break immediately. He thinks that should be made very clear.

In the immediate after, in the haze of medication and traction and surgery, of spinal fusion ( _there is metal inside of him and it seems so unfair, that his vulnerability should be inside of him too, steel and wire holding him together until it seems he will break apart)_ and of physiotherapy, he is numb.

 

 

He is numb as he relearns everything, numb as he struggles to put on his trousers, numb as he falls while transferring, numb as he realises that this is forever.

It hurts.

It hurts so goddamned much, and it seems so damnably unfair, that he should be in this much pain and yet so numb at the same time.

He tests the boundaries- where sensation starts to go, around his belly button, and where it vanishes completely at his hips. The intermediate is like fire, a no-man’s land of damaged nerves too useless to do anything but not willing to fall into the sensation-free sleep of their brothers in arms.

They give him morphine.

It is possible, in those early days, that he takes too much of it.

He is numb.

 

They open the school, and if it is not the same, not what it should have been, with Raven and Erik teaching by his side- then it is enough. Their students are few, but it is enough.

_(He reaches out sometimes, checking locations and resources of Erik and his-- his followers. They are hungry more often than not, and so very angry. He feels it when Angel is taken, when Azazel is shot, and their agony burns through the numbness like a knife and Charles finds himself vomiting mostly liquid out the window of his study.)_

 

 

He is not a good teacher. He is impatient, sometimes frightening, sometimes too far away to pay attention to the words of his pupils, and it is good that they are not so young. They had initially planned to take students as soon as they were school aged, but-- well. Charles isn’t sure he could have handled that.

When the drinking starts, he can hide it. He has some experience with alcoholics, after all- until one morning when Alex says something, rubs him the wrong way, and through his haze he can feel himself raise his hand as though to strike the boy.

Alex flinches.

 

 

Charles flees. He takes his chair as far across the grounds as it will take him, until he is enveloped in green, and then he cries.

He cries, and screams, and bangs his fists against the ground, dirt grinding into the knees of his trousers, and this is not fair.

He curses Erik, and Raven, and thrice-damned Shaw, for doing this to him. He curses himself most of all, for turning into what he had always been most scared of being.

When he gets back to the mansion, it is late. Charles empties his bottle of whiskey down the drain ( _only the current one, the most recent, he can fool even himself that he does not remember the locations of his mother's secret stashes in the old bedrooms)_ and washes down his pills with water. Only the recommended dose, nothing more.

 

 

 

The next morning, his new-found resolution is shattered. Erik is in prison. The President is dead.

Charles is alone.

Some students leave- those with parents, those young enough to be under their jurisdiction. A mutant has killed the president, a known associate of Professor Xavier, and they are scared. There are public attacks on mutants, the politics writ large with sticky blood and hot tears.

 

Charles does not blame them. He thinks he would have been scared too, once.

The older students stay, and isn’t that a blessing- Charles takes them to the range, teaches them some of what he learned in Korea, search and rescue, first aid. He teaches them defensive strategies only, and he tells himself that this is what makes him different than Erik.

If Erik had been there, he would have snorted and agreed. Erik would never condemn children to death for his own stupid ideals.

_(And look at how well Erik's ideals had turned out for them.)_

 

Charles starts drinking again. He can’t help it. The taste of grain on his tongue is like a warm embrace and a condemnation all at once, and he thinks that he would relish the pain and the rage if it did not leave him like this, wrung-out, strung-out, with no sense of the boundaries between his fear and everyone else’s.

Hank and Alex are worried about him. Sean left a while ago, there was trouble at home. He sends letters, cheerful at first.

_(When his home is burned, his sister inside- Charles feels the pain from across the country, and he knows that there will be no more letters.)_

 

 

Armando comes back, and that is both a blessing and a curse because they are short on teachers, because Charles can’t have lost everyone, because they should have looked for him and they didn’t.

Charles starts washing his pills down with whiskey, and thinks perhaps that the near-constant pain in his head is just a sympathetic pain for his liver. He has no illusions about this. He is going to die this way, but perhaps that is for the best.

They don’t need him, anymore.

 

 

 

His student need him, though, and so he teaches them everything he knows and more, stays just this side of drunkenness for their sake if not his own.

He will be grateful for this, foolishly, childishly grateful, when the first of their numbers is called and it is Scott.

Alex volunteers the same night, and though Charles discourages them, tells them that he can hide them, that he still has contacts in the UK and Canada, that there are places they can go- they refuse. Charles thinks that Alex might have ran, might have listened, if not for Scott.

He could have stopped them, could have gone into their minds and changed things, but he does not. The truth is that he is not as strong as he should be, and that that thought scares him even as he welcomes it. His boundaries are so thin, now.

Armando is called eventually, as are the students, or they run away first and one by one they leave him to his misery and his own head.

Hank stays. They are not picky about mutants, will take anyone in their country’s time of need, but Hank has successfully suppressed his mutation and in his human form his feet are misshapen, make him incapable of running or even walking very fast, and he is given medical dispensation.

 

 

Charles drinks. Hank stays and Charles drinks, on and on into infinity until--

well. Until Hank, in what Charles recognises as a Hail Mary pass from the days when he still cared enough to throw them, offers him a cure.

He warns him of the side effects, that it may deafen and blind him to the outside world, and it sounds like a blessing.

It doesn’t work- well, that isn’t quite true. It extends the sensory no-man’s land all the way down, until he can feel and move his feet and every step is an exquisite agony. He maps this, too, plans drunkenly of one day writing a paper, conducts sensory testing with the sharp and dull ends of a scalpel and if this isn’t proper medical procedure what does it matter? So little matters anymore.

He adds to the dull knots of scar tissue on his legs and abdomen piece by patchwork piece, and when he sees himself in the mirror he scarcely recognises himself anymore.

He used to be so handsome.

 

 

When the stranger comes, claims knowledge of him, of his future, Charles is inclined to send him on his way. Except- except it could be true, except he has some sense of responsibility even now, except everyone is dead or gone or both and for the first time in a decade he feels something even if it is anger.

They rescue Erik, and he is infuriating and beautiful and how dare he, how dare Erik be so smug and clear-minded and beautiful when Charles is this. How dare he break him, yet show no signs of breaking himself?

_(Charles knows this is not a kind thought, knows that Erik’s soul has been burnished by pain and flame until it is as strong as steel and twice as deadly. It does not matter. )_

 

 

They fight on the plane, and it is glorious. Charles is half-drunk, but only half, and it is so good to have someone to spark his rage, someone who deserves it, a face for the dozens whose sins he had bore and who had left him-

The fight is barely over, the plane barely removed from its kamikaze course into the Pacific, when Erik looks at him.

“You’ve got metal in you,” he says softly. “At first I thought it was the chair, but you don’t have the chair- Charles, what is it?”

How could you, he means, and Do you still trust me that much, you foolish man? and Charles may not have his powers but he can hear it as clear as day, and he pinches his thigh to see if the drug is wearing off.

“Yes,” he says, “Well. It’s amazing what surgeons can do these days, but even they cannot fuse four vertebrae with plastic.”

Erik is silent, after that, until he sets down the chess board in front of them.

_(It is his first game in ten years. He’s still better at it than Erik, though.)_

Paris is a disaster, and Charles knows in his throbbing bones that he could have stopped it if he had had his powers back. Logan tells him as much, and the knowledge burns him, the knowledge that after all this time he is still powerless to stop the pain of others, of his students, of his children, and Raven most of all.

_(Erik had taught him that others have a right to their pain, but that will never stop Charles from trying to bear it on their behalf.)_

 

He gets his powers back, and drinks a little less- just enough to take the edge off, to stop the tremors and hallucinations he knows await him just out of site. He sips from a hip flask in the crowd in D.C., offers a sip to the wounded veteran in the chair next to him out of politeness.

When it all goes to hell, he is pinned beneath cement and rebar and the pain is almost too much to bear, he is bleeding and shaking and this will not be the last memory he has of Erik, he has survived this much and he did not bleed out on that godforsaken Cuban beach and he will not do so on the front lawn of the White House, _Raven dear God you have to stop him!_

And she does.

 

 

 

Charles goes home, and the silence presses unbearably around him.

He makes Hank throw out his liquor, makes him go through his study and his bedroom and the garage even though it will show him to be the fool that Erik always thought he was. He accepts Hank’s pity and anger as his just punishment, hands Hank his checkbook and bank card so that he cannot buy more, and locks himself into his study for two weeks.

He is hallucinating, he knows that he is, because _KoreaMarkoCubaErikWashington **Erik**_ didn’t happen this way, because there was no way that he wouldn’t, and he hopes that his shielding is strong enough to stop anyone from feeling it.

Maybe he should have waited until his shields were stronger, but if he had not done it when he returned from hospital after Washington he knows that he would never have done it.

 

 

 

He calls for them, sometimes. In between the vomiting and the shaking and the hallucinations, when he is half out of his mind with pain and he has to stop himself from reaching for Hank, from manipulating his mind, from pretending this had never happened, he calls for them.

He knows this because, on the third or the fourth or the six hundredth day, his door is unlocked. A tray of food is slid inside, alongside a pitcher of orange juice and a pill.

_Raven called. She wants to know if she need to come home. This is chlordiazepoxide. It should help._

He eats some of the food, enough to know that it will not stay in his stomach. His hands are shaking too much to hold a pen, too much to hold the glass without spilling orange juice all over his bed. He manages to turn the paper around and write something vaguely recognisable as a ‘ _NO_ ’.

He looks at the pill longingly, and then crushes it under the castor of his wheelchair. He hopes that he is not pathetic enough to try and lick the crushed powder from the floor, but just in case he wipes it up with a damp cloth and throws the cloth out the window.

The activity leaves him weak and shaking, and he falls into another uneasy sleep. The dreams are worse than the hallucinations only because they happened, because while in the hallucinations Raven calls him an arrogant bastard who never cared for anyone but himself in the dreams she leaves him, Erik leaves him, over and over again as he lies dying on a beach and a million frightened screams are in his head and only some of them are his.

 

 

He wakes up choking on his own vomit and feels strong arms supporting him, pushing his head between his scarred knees so that he vomits on the floor and not into his lungs.

He gets some on him anyway, and his shirt is vile, stained yellow with sweat and soaked with vomit, and the same arms lift the shirt off of him as gently as though he is a child. A different child. Charles has not felt such gentleness since Raven last patched his wounds two decades or a century ago.)

“Erik?” He mumbles, and in return there are no words, only a haze of smothered anxiety and anger and love that he has never been quite able to forget.

He is feverish, and the shaking has not stopped, and this all would be so much easier if the room would stop changing before his eyes. He closes them instead, because Erik will protect him from whatever is happening. Erik has always protected him from everything except himself.

The next days pass in a fog. He wakes sometimes to a cool cloth on his face, to a glass of juice being pressed to his lips. He pisses himself and shits himself and somehow he never wakes up alone.

 

 

 

The first day of clarity is painful. He is naked except for an undershirt, and his bedclothes are freshly laundered. There is a glass of milk and a piece of toast sitting on his bedside table, with explicit instructions to ‘ _EAT ME_ ’.

Erik walks in as he is struggling with the toast. He feels as weak as a kitten, like all the fight has been drained out of him. Erik glares at him.

“I thought you were going to die,” Erik says quietly.

Charles coughs. His voice is a cracked whisper, his throat burned by stomach acid. “Me too.”

“What do you want from me?” Erik asks as he lingers by the door.

Charles raises his eyebrows incredulously. “You came to me. The last I was aware, you didn’t want anything to do with me and I was here. _Alone_.” He starts to push himself up further on the bed, and his arm muscles quiver and collapse. They cannot support his weight.

Erik rushes to his side, pulls him into position with a practiced hand. “You called me. Or, you called Raven and she called me,” he says, and the harshness of his tone belies the gentleness of his actions. “About a week ago. You weren’t making any sense- she thought you were being tortured, and Hank wouldn’t tell us anything.”

“I asked him not to.”

Erik frowns. “Idiot. But that’s why I came, Charles."

His frown deepens, and he licks his lips as though to better lubricate the words. "I’ll always come when you call, even if it’s against my better judgement.”

Charles smirks tiredly. “And I to you, old friend.”

“So,” Erik says, his words careful like he is dancing on spiderwebs, “What do you want from me?”

Charles does not say anything. He feels a lump in his stomach as though he is going to vomit, and after a moment Erik shakes his head and turns towards the door, and Charles knows as well as he has ever known anything that if Erik leaves now  _he will never come back_. 

“Don’t leave,” Charles says before he can stop himself. “Please. Don’t leave me alone again.”

Charles is not sure if he means now or forever.

Erik stops and cocks his head.

“Please,” Charles says, hating how desperate he sounds and knowing that his shields are so obliterated that Erik has felt all of this, can feel his desperation and fear and self-loathing.

Erik watches him carefully for a moment, and then nods. After another  moment, he lowers himself into the bed next to him.

Charles lets himself close his eyes, breathes in the comforting smell of soap and gun oil and Paco Rabanne that follows Erik wherever he goes.

He is drifting off to sleep when he jerks awake, a sudden clutch of anxiety in his chest. Erik looks at him with concern.

“What’s wrong?”

“Nothing,” Charles says quickly, because he cannot bring himself to say ‘I thought you might have left’. He has vomited, pissed, and shit himself in front of this man- and, a lifetime ago, experienced some more pleasant bodily functions with him- but he must have some dignity.

Erik hums noncommittally and begins to read the newspaper out loud, something about mutant politics and the search for his whereabouts, punctuating it with bitingly sarcastic commentary that Charles absolutely disagrees with, but--

well. He falls asleep.

 

 


End file.
